Storage

I don't know about other people, but when I was a child, I was inventing things such as a musical instrument made out of a folded piece of cardboard and some rubber bands. Ten year-old Clara Lazen, however, has done something a little more noteworthy. The fifth-grader from Kansas City, Missouri, built a model of a molecule that is new to science. If the molecule itself were to actually be created, it could possibly be used for energy storage, or in explosives.
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A new Kickstarter product to address that First Worldiest of First World problems, errant electronics cables, is off to a flying start. Since launching the project page, the Recoil Winder family of spring-loaded, self-winding cable holders has attracted five times the starting goal of US$10,000, and with 19 days to go. Seeing a Winder in action, it isn't hard to see why. The spring-loaded mechanism appears to be very quick and easy to use, and the result is so neat it's hard to watch one in action without imagining a future free of boxes, drawers and cupboards full of entwined masses of seemingly self-tangling cables.
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Wall-mounted bike-hanging hooks are certainly a good way of keeping a bicycle off of the floor and out of the way, but let’s be honest ... they’re also often used as a means of displaying a particularly nice bike, almost as if it’s a work of art. That being the case, some cyclists might find it a little counter-intuitive to use plain old hardware store hooks for showing off their masterpiece of motorless transportation. That’s where the Bike Valet comes in. Not only does the bike-hanging device look pretty snazzy, but it also incorporates some practical features.
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On Wednesday, Seagate announced it was shipping the world’s first 4TB external hard drive in the form of the 4TB GoFlex Desk Drive, which offers a high speed USB 3.0 interface. Obviously looking to steal a bit of Seagate’s thunder – or should that be Thunderbolt – the very next day Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) demoed its own 4TB external hard drives at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam in a two-drive, 8TB, RAID 0, G-RAID unit with Thunderbolt, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports.
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San Francisco's Cloud Engines has announced its first mobile-focused device at IFA 2011. Pogoplug Mobile will allow users to securely stream entire libraries of digital content from connected storage in their homes to their Android or iOS mobile phone and tablet, without having to worry about bothersome monthly fees or storage limits. It will also cater for private sharing of media with family and friends and could well be the perfect companion for Amazon's Cloud Drive and Player or Apple's upcoming iCloud service. Gizmag caught up with Pogoplug's Daniel Putterman in Berlin for a quick look at what's on offer...
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Marrying space saving efficiency with a touch of 21st Century hospitality, Yotel hotels treat guests to a fully automated check-in service featuring Yobot, a theatrically lit robotic baggage drop-off machine that creates a mechanical performance for guests as it loads and stores their belongings. The robot porter is just the beginning of the novel hotel experience offered by Yotel, a capsule style hotel chain with locations in London, New York and Amsterdam.
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Texas Memory Systems has just unveiled a monster enterprise-level PCIe-based solid state storage solution that's blisteringly fast and offers almost a terabyte of available capacity. Nicknamed Gorilla by the company, the RamSan-70 represents the seventh generation of the RamSan product family and uses Toshiba 32nm SLC Flash on a single half-length x8 PCIe card. It's said to offer up to 330,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) read performance and 160,000 write, and up to 2GB per second sustained random throughput.
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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has unveiled a rugged external drive and some new high capacity storage solutions aimed at audio/video professionals at this year's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas. The new additions to the G-Technology range support Standard Definition, High Definition, 2K, or 4K post production workflows for Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and a host of other post production software solutions. Interface options include FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA, with 3TB 7200 RPM Hitachi enterprise and desktop class hard drives playing a central role and various RAID configurations also on offer. The company has also announced that Thunderbolt I/O devices will be landing later in the year.
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No sooner has Thunderbolt – previously known as Light Peak – hit the market in the form of Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, than LaCie has unveiled the first of what will no doubt be a flood of new Thunderbolt-capable devices to be announced in the coming months. Thanks to the new I/O technology, which boasts data transfer speeds of 10Gbps, LaCie’s Little Big Disk can perform full system backups in minutes and deliver multiple streams of HD video while offloading content without compromising performance.
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Scientists may be working on things like increasing the efficiency of solar cells, finding new methods of filtering water and growing hardier strains of wheat, but they have been woefully neglecting one important task for decades ... creating a better way of closing plastic bags. Currently, options include twist ties, spring-loaded clips, plastic tabs and zip-lock bags. The first three of those aren’t particularly sturdy, while it’s often difficult to get zip-locks to seal properly. Perhaps, however, all of us frustrated plastic-baggers might have better luck with the recently-released Pull Ties.
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